Tuesday 13 November 2012

Nadeem Aslam 'The Blind Man's Garden' Book Cover illustration

BMG 2nd version final 1

This is a book cover I created for Nadeem Aslam, a prize-winning British Pakistani novelist, for his new novel, 'The Blind Man's Garden'.

Blurb:
October 2001. Following the terrorist attacks in America the previous month, Western armies have invaded Afghanistan. The Blind Man’s Garden revolves around Gio and his foster-brother Mikal, who leave their home in Pakistan to go to war.
Within hours of entering the rugged Afghan landscape, Gio is killed in battle. Mikal—named after the warrior angel—emerges from the carnage and begins his dangerous search for Gio, unaware that he has died. But his deepest wish is to return home—to the young woman he loves and who loves him, Gio’s wife. An Odyssean voyage he soon undertakes.
She waits for him in the blind man’s garden, feeling with a powerful and resilient love that he is still alive. She tends to the eyes of the aged blind man, whose own mind is tormented by the mistakes he had made during the course of his life in the name of ‘Islam’ and nationhood. He mourns his beautiful wife whom he had punished for painting living things against Allah’s wishes, and he grieves over the school he had founded that has now been usurped by Pakistan’s sinister spy agency, the ISI.
After the long separation the two young lovers unite briefly, a few days’ idyll haunted by the ruins of war and the peacetime human tragedies. In the book’s final section—a piece of sustained vision-like storytelling—Mikal must return to Waziristan and face his destiny. Moving through Al-Qaeda’s hideouts in Waziristan and the military prisons set up by Americans, The Blind Man’s Garden is an epic that takes in horses erupting from the ground during the Indian Mutiny and a Beslan-like school siege, while simultaneously celebrating the healing powers of nature, and of art, music and literature.

I made the image using watercolour and coloured Derwent Pencils, with some Photoshopping at the end.

The image went through several rounds of edits, and I ended up having to completely redesign it. Scroll down to see the process...

ROUGHS:

bmg 2nd version ROUGH 3

bmg 2nd version

I drew the bees separately and photoshopped them onto the lemons:

bees

Rough sketch of the bees:

blue bee

REFERENCE IMAGES:

73991_full_1024x788

stillife2

unnamed

ORIGINAL VERSION (before redesign):

final less leaves 3

ROUGHS:

rough 2

bmg rough 1

REFERENCE IMAGES:

NADEEM ASLAM reference image

NADEEM ASLAM reference image

1 comment:

grace crawford said...

Nadeem Aslam at its best and I was delighted to be able to find it in hardcopy. Delivered quickly and hassle free, as Amazon always does. read it, you will never forget it.
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